


In For A Penny

by laserlesbian



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boxing, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29855574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laserlesbian/pseuds/laserlesbian
Summary: Weiss and Ruby have been married for years. Weiss is a successful technology executive and Ruby a successful boxer. But when Ruby is injured and Weiss starts bringing her work home with her in the form of an experimental robot named Penny, their lives become significantly more complicated.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Penny Polendina/Ruby Rose, Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	In For A Penny

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know when chapter 2 is going to drop, but I'm working on it! Enjoy this setup and Ruby's horrendous cooking skills.

_Questionable pancakes -- things slip out -- a cursed tablet -- The Necessary Parts -- Penny -- skipping, the advisability thereof -- legal limits on caffeine consumption, a recommendation for -- meditations on punching things -- Ruby revs up -- Yang does not flirt_

* * *

There were a great many things Weiss Schnee would rather do than disappoint her wife. Eating her cooking was one of them, but only barely. She had to admit, the pancakes were inspirational.  _ Yes _ , she thought glumly as she picked away at one with a knife, fork, and determination,  _ they’re giving me some wonderful ideas about the circular carbon brushes we were talking about for the new DC motors. _

The perplexing thing was that Ruby seemed unbothered by the state of her… yes, it was possible to continue to dignify them with the term “pancakes,” they still even showed something like a normal pancake color in some parts. The fact that you could probably write on them with a piece of chalk barely seemed to register. She still packed them away frighteningly fast, wolfing them down in a bite or two before going back for seconds, then thirds.

When Ruby cooked breakfast, Weiss tended to accompany whatever the meal was with a grapefruit and a small bowl of instant oatmeal. Ruby had accepted that she was doing this “for her health,” but she had never asked enough questions to ascertain that this had been a reference to her dental health and her desire to keep her perfect, glittering white smile free of chipped teeth for as long as possible.

This was an impulse that Ruby would have understood on an intellectual level, but not a personal one. Her upper left central incisor was chipped and its right-handed mate had a thin white crack running right across it. This was the extent of the visible damage, but Weiss knew that her bottom right incisor was an implant. She had footed the bill and held Ruby’s head in her lap as she came around from the dental anaesthetic, staring at the world as if it was all brand new and fascinating, and mostly staring at Weiss.

While still in the hazy state between anaesthesia and true consciousness, Ruby had told Weiss that she loved her for the first time. They had been together for six months, long enough for Weiss to have no qualms about footing a bill like this. It was only forty five hundred dollars and since she had, at the time, had access to her family’s wealth, that was virtually nothing. Besides, she had said to herself the night before the surgery as she lay in Ruby’s hard, narrow bed and tried to find a position where some part of her was touched by the stream of marginally chilled air from the window AC unit without some other part of her slipping off the mattress, if she was serious about this relationship, which she was, it was important that she be able to look out for her girlfriend when she needed it, how she needed it.

After Ruby had woken up all the way, Weiss had asked her if she meant it, and Ruby had said “the part about the ceiling being made of cheese? I meant it, but I don’t think it was true,” with such dejection and apparent mortification that Weiss didn’t have the heart to correct her. She’d said it over dinner later that week anyway. Sometimes, something just had to slip out once, however unintentionally, for it to be only a matter of time before it came out of hiding for good.

Ruby stretched, cracking both her shoulders and raising the cropped hem of her pajama t-shirt just high enough to make Weiss blush. “I’m gonna go to the gym early today, I want to get some time on the bag before Yang makes me do boring stuff like ‘stretch.’”

Weiss dropped her fork and knife a little too quickly, thankful for the distraction from her continuing show of eating the pancakes. “Is that really wise? Shouldn’t you warm up first, like Yang’s always telling you to do?” She knew this wouldn’t get anywhere, but she had to try. It was a wives thing.

Ruby rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, I’ll start slow to warm up! If Nora’s there, I won’t even spar with her until after Yang comes by. Deal?”

Weiss grinned. Maybe she was making some progress after seven years of this. Maybe. “Deal. And you’re going to drink  _ water _ , not just some sticky-sweet coffee from Dust ‘Til Dawn.”

Ruby responded with a theatrical shrug and a kiss planted on Weiss’s cheek. “I’m gonna get changed and grab my gear, I’m betting you’ll be gone by the time I’m out of the bedroom. Good luck at work, kick butt in your meeting with Daddy Warbucks, and I’ll see you for the fight tonight?”

Weiss giggled. “Sure thing. Seven o’ clock, I’ll buy you dinner if you win!” She’d buy her dinner if she lost, too, but then it would probably be takeout ordered to the house while she drew a cold bath. 

She watched Ruby leave the kitchen and climb the stairs. As soon as she was out of line of sight, Weiss opened the back window of the kitchen and, with a pang of guilt swiftly quenched by the cool waters of relief, scraped her remaining “pancakes” into the rose bushes outside. Ruby would see them in the trash, and last time she’d tried to put them down the garbage disposal in the sink, they’d needed to call a plumber.

The first of the day’s problems dealt with, Weiss slung her laptop bag over her shoulder, folded her silver blazer over one arm, tugged on the wedge heels she favored on difficult days, checked her hair in the mirror in the front hallway, and left her house. 

_ Daddy Warbucks _ , she reflected as she strolled down the sidewalk in the yellow morning light towards the commuter train station,  _ the second of the day’s problems _ . She felt some residual guilt over the moniker, but it described her father increasingly well, lately.

As CEO of Schnee Robotics, Jacques Schnee had been a visionary, in a certain sense. Unfortunately, they had not been very nice visions, more the type that might be recorded on a stone tablet covered in warning signs to future travellers who might have the misfortune to come across them. In the last fifteen years he had managed, via a combination of widely unpopular policies, questionable business decisions, and ruthless competition, to run the company so close to the brink of extinction for so long that it had, somehow, burned away the excess and left only the ticking, beating heart of its operations behind for Jacques to take apart and inspect.

Thus Schnee Robotics had, unlike most large technology companies of its type, avoided the usual bloat of unnecessary legacy systems, eliminated several high-level positions occupied by useless or actively damaging freeloaders, and shaped what tiny, essential core of itself was left into a very thin dagger with a very sharp point. It had all worked, somehow, hanging together via the traditional binders of cheap coffee and personal pride in a job well done, as well as a somewhat more unusual medium - the iron-tough will of Jacques Schnee. And then, one day out of the blue, a press release had emerged from Schnee Robotics’ impenetrable C-level executive suite, reshaping Weiss’s life.

It announced sweeping changes to the company’s route forward in the world - they were hiring five hundred new employees, almost doubling the length of their payroll. They were breaking out from their standard industrial and manufacturing robotics offerings to consumer robotics, utility robotics and, to the surprise of no one and everyone, defense contracting.

But the line that had made Weiss drop her coffee on the tiled floor of the kitchen in the little apartment she shared with Ruby came near the bottom, in a list of changes to the management structure and public face of the company - 

“ _ On the basis of her massive contributions to the Schnee Robotics culture and technology base, her leadership of the department she has overseen for three years, and the trust I place in not only her technical ability but her business savvy, Weiss Schnee will soon be stepping into a role as the Company’s chief technical officer. I wish her all the best, both as her chief executive and as her father _ .”

She had called Jacques from her cell phone while standing there, feeling the coffee soak through her left sock and watching the handle of the shattered mug rock itself into stillness on the grey tile. She got his secretary, who congratulated her on the promotion and told her that “Mr. Schnee is busy for the rest of the morning, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to call his daughter back at lunch!”

He hadn’t. Weiss had only gotten the key code to the executive suite because she’d asked the incumbent CFO for it. She had only known when she was to assume this new role when her calendar suddenly became flooded with meeting invites from people who had previously been three pay grades higher than she was. The finely balanced dagger of Schnee Robotics was being slipped between someone’s ribs, and if Jacques was the hand holding it, Weiss was to be its point.

Now, she had been that point for two years. With her first paycheck, she had bought a house for herself and Ruby. It wasn’t a mansion by any respects, but it had a sizable back yard and was large enough for two guest rooms and a home gym. Ruby had insisted on that last point. She still went to her old boxing gym in an adjacent neighborhood, but she had wanted to be able to practice at off hours as well. Weiss hadn’t objected, and so the house at 17 George Street had become their home.

The majority of her pay now went into a savings account, a safety net of some considerable size against the day when she… what, got fired? Left Schnee Robotics? Not likely, she thought to herself as she watched houses and trees blur past out the window of her train. 

Her life had been wrapped up in that company. She had grown up watching her father rise from senior vice president of operations to CEO, making her family’s fortune. Then, she had watched in fascinated horror as he stripped the company of everything he deemed unnecessary, refined it and honed its edge. This was when she had joined his workforce, fresh out of college and thrown into the deep end of management, running an overlooked, skeleton crew business unit developing a tiny line of consumer robotics. He had honed her, too, forced her to make aggressive cuts to spending, to fire some of her best employees, some she considered friends.

“Every machine has its necessary parts. Everything else is disposable, no matter how much you may like its glitter,” he had said when she protested after the second such round of cuts. She knew she couldn’t argue. Since childhood, she had known that there was no point in arguing once his voice took on that particular edge. So she had bent the knee to her father once again, trimming and slicing her unit down to just twenty skillful, well-matched engineers. Running on a shoestring budget, those teams had nevertheless managed to produce some of Schnee Robotics’ most popular products from the period that Weiss, in the privacy of her own home, often referred to as “the culling.”

And then, without warning or discussion, she had risen to the position of CTO like a cork bobbing up in a deep pool. After the initial shock and confusion wore off, she had actually taken to liking the job quite a bit. She had convinced Jacques to let her be a little more hands-on than a traditional CTO, so she still worked with some of the company’s brightest and best engineers. It had given her the freedom to explore some directions that she felt the company had neglected previously, allowing her to grow a division of the company into something more in line with her vision for the future, rather than Jacques’.

His, it had turned out, was rather more blood-soaked than hers. Pivoting the company towards an investment in defense contracting, he had announced plans to bid on a number of Army and Air Force contracts for autonomous battlefield systems. Ultimately, the company had secured several, outbidding Ironwood Industries and a number of other established defense contractors. This had left Weiss responsible for the development of weapons of war, a position she had never wanted to find herself in.

Nevertheless, she did it. As she stepped off the train onto the platform a block from her office, her head was already swimming with solutions from her direct reports to the problems presented by the half dozen autonomous weapons and equipment platforms they were developing. She submerged this all in a mire of doublethink, keeping her eyes on the technical challenges ahead, ignoring as best she could their eventual applications. Through all of it ran one bright note, one beacon of hope for what her work could be, what her work  _ should _ be: Penny.

As she badged through the security gates on the first floor of the building, nodding and smiling at the guard as she passed, she scrolled through the list of reasons the Penny project was worth pursuing. Her first order of business today was a meeting with Jacques and the rest of the C-levels at the company, and she knew she would have to defend Penny once again. It had been like this for months, the explanation a familiar litany now. “ _ Penny represents the union of our most advanced work in general intelligence, mobility systems, manipulators, and sensing. At the very least, it’s a platform we can leverage to test new advances in our software, and at best it could be a wildly useful product for customers with certain specialized requirements. _ ”

She tried to put out of her head the fact that those requirements almost certainly included espionage and assassination. Who better to creep and kill in the dark than something with a human face and body but which had no conscience, no hint of hesitation, the strength of ten men combined, backscatter x-ray vision built in, and no legal record whatsoever of its history or existence.

She had reached the top of the sweeping staircase to the second floor of the office building. Here she stopped, staring at the big double doors to the board room, shut tight, not a hint of sound escaping from the other executives who she knew waited inside. She tugged on her blazer, squared her shoulders, and pushed open the heavy oak doors.

* * *

Five minutes after Weiss turned the corner at the end of George Street, heading for the train station, Ruby stepped out the front door, locked it, and took the steps two at a time down to the sidewalk. It was a nice day, sunny but not too hot yet, though she knew it would be a different story by noon. She walked quickly nevertheless because she found it difficult to go anywhere at a pace more sedate than what might kindly be described as a sort of slow trot. She skipped a little at every third step, causing the heavy gym bag slung across her back to bounce and threaten to topple her. Passers by occasionally gave her a strange look, seeing a small woman in her late twenties skipping down the sidewalk like a little girl, but she alternated between not noticing and not caring.

It was fifteen minutes from their house to Beacon Boxing and its neighbor, a coffee house called From Dust ‘Til Dawn. She didn’t actually like coffee very much, it was always too bitter. But Jaune worked here and she liked the owner, a kind old man who always seemed like someone had just managed to pull one over on him. Jaune didn’t judge her for the amount of caramel syrup she asked for in her drinks, and she didn’t judge him for the way he went weak at the knees any time Pyrrha, one of the trainers from Beacon, came into the shop. It was the foundation of a thriving friendship, and the reason she patronized Dust ‘Til Dawn on a daily basis.

Today, she had to wait in line behind a few people getting their morning coffee on their way to work, but she had arrived after the majority of the rush hour. She tossed her bag on the bench at the long table nearest to the counter, and waited for her turn. It would be wrong to say she waited patiently, she was not known for her patience, but wait she did, tapping her sneakered feet on the bare wood floor.

By the time she made it to the counter she was the last in line, so she took her time, waiting for Jaune to finish serving the final commuter ahead of her. He came back to the register to find her leaning on the counter with both elbows, staring at a brownie in the pastry case. She looked up as if distracted from something important, and smiled. “Hey Jaune! Just the usual and uh, maybe one of those brownies.” She sounded a little ashamed of herself, as if Jaune wasn’t used to feeding her concerning sugar habit.

He sighed and shook his head, a little theatrically. “Someday you’re going to punch one of the bags over there through the wall into this place, and I’m going to have to explain that I sold you the coffee that made you do it. Well, I mean, ‘coffee.’” Ruby’s “usual” was a terrifying concoction involving more espresso and more sugar than any one person should be allowed to have, legally. Still shaking his head, he left the register, eyeing the bottle of caramel syrup on top of the espresso machine reproachfully.

Five minutes later, he returned with her drink and the brownie in a paper bag. Ruby thanked him and paid, tipping him generously, picked up her duffel bag and, already unwrapping the brownie, headed out the door for the gym.

Beacon Boxing was more than just her gym, now. It was her touchpoint with what had, up until about three years ago, been reality for Ruby Schnee, née Rose. Money hadn’t been tight since Weiss had begun supporting her to progressively larger and larger extents, but there had been a time when she was still Ruby Rose, hardware store employee and bantamweight boxer. Once the income she’d received from her job at the hardware store had been eclipsed tenfold by Weiss’s salary she had quit, focusing all of her energy on her sport. Then Weiss’s world had turned on its axis, pitching them into the search for a house, the reality of a new future unfolding in front of them.

And then, a few weeks later, Ruby had woken up one Saturday morning in the master bedroom of the house at 17 George Street with the sun streaming in through the gaps in the curtains, spilling across her wife’s sleeping form and lighting up the buttery yellow of the opposite wall, at peace and in a state of perfect bliss. As she shifted slightly, edging a little closer to Weiss, some internal anchor or restraint snapped, cutting her loose in an instant, her mind flapping in the winds of change that had swept over her life, scouring away every trace of where she had come from, what her world had looked like before this.

Weiss had found her half an hour later, sitting in the kitchen with a glass of water, spinning her wedding ring on the table like a top, watching it dance on its diamond before losing speed and toppling. Weiss had stood in the doorway watching Ruby catch the ring before it hit the table, set it spinning again, over and over. Once Ruby noticed her, Weiss had made breakfast while they talked about the past and the future. Ruby had spent most of that day at the gym, and most of the next. And the day after that, and most days after that, too.

That was then. Now, they had an arrangement. When Weiss was at the office, Ruby was at the gym. When Weiss came home, Ruby was either already there, coming out of the shower, or shortly on her heels. When Weiss worked late, Ruby would order pizza and spar with whoever was still hanging around the gym. When Ruby had a fight, Weiss would turn out with ringside seats, wincing at every blow landed on her wife and cheering along with Ruby’s gym buddies at every blow she landed on her opponent.

Evenings and weekends, though, were theirs, together. Whatever else they each had going on in their lives, they made time. Evenings were the times for Weiss to cook while Ruby sat reversed on a kitchen chair, straddling it with her arms crossed on top of its back. They kept each other company, unloaded the day’s or week’s events, and Weiss made sure that Ruby never, ever got within six feet of the stove.

The gym kept Ruby anchored. It kept some part of her Ruby Rose. As much as she loved being Ruby Schnee, she would always need that part of her somewhere. Training on the bags was good for that, training with Yang holding pads even better. Nothing came close, though, to getting in a ring. Whether she was sparring or fighting for a purse, that part of her came alive in the moment of the bell’s ringing, a great creature rising from a coiled sleep to growl at the world and show them who she was.

Today, she would get her fight. It had been a few weeks since her last and she was itching to get back in the ring. Levering the door open with an elbow because her hands were still occupied with her coffee and the remains of her brownie, the smell of old socks, sweat, leather, soap, and floor wax smacked her in the face. The creature stirred, and she grinned.

The eternally bored girl who sat behind the desk near the door smiled and nodded at Ruby. They knew each other, at least in passing. Everyone here knew Ruby. Yang had once observed that she was as much of a fixture of the gym as the heavy bags. When Ruby had dropped her guard to take the compliment, Yang had said “and you’re just as easy to hit!” and almost dislocated her jaw. That had been a good day.

Ruby stowed her gear in a locker and wrapped her hands, reveling in the familiar repetition of the task. Thumb, wrist, back up to the knuckles, twice and three times across and around, back down to the wrist and around, then up under the base of the thumb, between the last two fingers, back to the thumb, between the next two fingers and so on, then around and across the palm, back around the wrist, once more around the knuckles, back to the wrist, one more turn, and press the velcro fastener strip down. Flex the fingers to test the stretch, all done.

Carrying her gloves and a water bottle, she shouldered open the door from the locker room into the central room of the gym. She lifted her headphones from where they rested around her neck, lowering them over her ears and pressing the button built into the cup of the right headphone. She pulled her gloves on, tightening the velcro with her teeth, took up station next to a heavy bag as the steady beat of the hip hop she favored for training began to thump in her ears, and let go.

It wasn’t the music she listened to recreationally, that was generally something with more electric guitar riffs and frenzied percussion. But her usual selection of metal had never worked for training. Boxing required rhythm, an ability to move to a beat set by yourself and your opponent. You ignored that rhythm at your peril, and as much as she enjoyed music from bands with logos that looked like a rose bush had once had an exciting night with a wrought iron fence, it didn’t have a beat that was anywhere near comprehensible.

Her heart tended beat in time to her training music sooner or later. Faster, usually, but always some whole number of beats in her chest to every beat in her ears. That was how she knew it was a good day, the kind of day where she could close her eyes and let the smell, the rhythm, the impact of gloves on bag and music on eardrum wash over her and carry her downstream, a piece of flotsam on the current, bobbing and dipping with its whim, being moved rather than moving herself.

She was in this state when Yang arrived an hour later. Yang watched her sister for a while, her eyes closed or half-closed, bouncing on the balls of her feet, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, throwing punches from the hips at every beat, ducking, rolling, or blocking imagined blows on every third. Her form was near impeccable, but that was hardly a surprise. She’d been boxing for eight years now, and Yang had been training her for four of those.

Eventually, the round timer Ruby had propped up on a stool sounded. She nailed the bag with a final left hook, the kind of knockout punch that would never get to be delivered in a real fight but that felt wonderful to throw at a bag. Ruby squatted on the floor next to the stool, drinking from her water bottle as the timer counted down a 60-second break, her back to the rest of the world. She was focused, and Yang knew she wouldn’t notice her unprompted.

“Hey sis!” No answer from Ruby. She moved closer, tapping a hunched shoulder delicately with the tip of her prosthetic, then catching the punch aimed at her midriff with her left elbow, batting it aside and stepping back.

“Yang! You scared me!” Ruby’s tone was severe, but she was smiling and Yang knew this dance.

“You’re gonna get in trouble like that, not paying any attention to who’s behind you! For all you knew, I could have been a bloodthirsty murder.” She did her best to twist her face into the kind of horrible grimace that wasn’t meant to look horrible at all. Ruby grinned back.

“Then you would have been in a lot of trouble! How’s my form?” Ruby bounced back to her feet, squaring up.

“Perfect, as usual.” It was a litany at this point, a ritual exchange every morning. “Did you stretch before you started?” Yang knew the answer, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to make an attempt.

“What do you think?” Ruby held up a hand to forestall Yang’s retort. “I wanted to get started early! But fine, let’s go.” She removed her gloves, put a hand on the wall, and followed Yang’s lead.

After fifteen minutes of stretching, they moved on. Yang watched Ruby warm back up on the bag, taking notes more out of habit than out of any need to correct her. Then she donned pads, one on her left hand and another, specially modified, strapped to her prosthetic right arm, and drilled Ruby on some of the combinations that they hadn’t covered recently. After ten minutes, she dropped the pads.

“Slow down, sis, come on. You know you’ll burn out like that. What’s up with you?” She narrowed her eyes. As far as she’d heard, there wasn’t anything wrong in Ruby’s life. Her marriage was happy, her fighting career had been going well. So where was this coming from?

Ruby pursed her lips. “I just want to blow off some energy today, nothing big. I’ve got the fight tonight and I want to be revved up for it.”

“At the rate you’re going, you’re just gonna be out of gas. Take a break, and we’ll come back with a little more control in a bit, ok?” Yang sighed. This wasn’t unusual for Ruby, a girl who had the dynamic energy of a flaming jet ski, but it wasn’t healthy, either. She was better now than she had been once, but she still tended to go too hard, too fast. If Yang had to pick one flaw in her sister’s otherwise near-perfect fighting style, that was it. Her defense was rock solid and she had a knack for assessing opponents’ weak spots faster than Yang herself could, but she’d lost too many fights after losing steam in round two.

“Fine, I guess I can take a minute. But I could keep going, you know I could.” Yang didn’t respond, knew that to respond would only be to encourage her. As Ruby stripped off her gloves and shadowboxed halfheartedly over her gym bag, Yang sat down on one of the benches near the front desk, taking the chance to drink deeply from her water bottle.

“Think she’s ready for tonight?” It was the girl from the front desk. She didn’t look like a boxer because she wasn’t one. She did, however, look like someone who wouldn’t mind a boxer noticing her. She was looking at Yang in such a way that, as much as she might wish otherwise, she found herself puffing her chest out slightly, putting on a cockier grin than usual. She didn’t flirt with pretty girls in gyms anymore.

The pretty girl in the gym smiled again.

_ Much _ . Yang thought ruefully.


End file.
